Chiang Kai-shek Airport, Hualin
0059
CHENLOFANNstrapped himself into the first officer’s seat of Island Flight A101, pulling on the headset. He had come from checking with Professor Ai in the back, making sure that the big jet was ready.
Discovering that the Americans had placed bugging devices in the hangar of his grandfather’s 767-200ER had caused him to move up his plans. But otherwise it had not complicated things too badly—his grandfather had apparently foreseen the possibility that the first plane would be discovered, and so had prepared a nearly identical 767 with the necessary launch and control apparatus, storing it in Hualin. Chen Lee must have suspected something himself, since he had ordered the UAV and the weapon moved from Taipei twenty-four hours before. Most likely he was only concerned about the possibility that security would be increased at the international airport when the president took off, but it was a fortuitous move.
Fate favored his plan. It was a sign that Chen Lo Fann had made the right decision to honor his grandfather’s wishes and fulfill his duty and destiny.
The only difficulty to be overcome was the length of the runway here. At roughly three thousand meters, it could not be called short. Nonetheless, it did present a challenge to the 767, which was not only fully loaded with fuel but had to take off with the UAV under its wing. Chen Lo Fann could not have gotten the plane up himself, and was only too glad to follow the exact command of the pilot in the captain’s seat as they completed their checklist and prepared to taxi to the runway.
Chen’s grandfather had disguised the aircraft well. It was a “combi” or combination passenger-cargo carrier; fake windows lined the fuselage, complete with lighting that helped simulate passengers moving around inside. The plane’s path from the hangar was obscured from the tower; the presence of the UAV under the wing could not be detected until it was off.
And then it would be too late.
The tower granted clearance. Chen Lo Fann took a long breath. The plane turned from the ramp.
“Ready?” asked the captain.
“Absolutely,” replied Chen, and the 767 began rumbling down the runway.
V
Vaporized
* * *
AboardRaven
15 September 1997
0100
DOG DID EVERYTHINGbut call a time-out, trying to settle his people down so the situation could be sorted out.
Besides a thorough search of the harbor site and a look at the sinking ship, they needed to review all the data gathered during the exchange. Dog quickly confirmed that this was going on, then went to Jed at the Pentagon.Now was the time for Washington involvement, he thought, though he was far too tactful to say that.
For now, anyway.
“Looking good, Colonel,” said Jed. “We confirm the so-called ghost clone is down.Dragon Prince is split in half; bow is gone. Navy asset R-1 is arriving now.”
R-1 was a specially equipped A-6 Intruder that carried a sensor array beneath its belly that would send live video (including near-infrared) back to the fleet, and from there back to the Tank. The destroyers, meanwhile, were close enough to see the flames from the stern section in the distance. “We’re ready to alert the authorities,” added Jed. “The ambassador is en route to the airport to meet with the Taiwan president.”
“Why the airport?” asked Dog.
“The president pushed up his flight to Beijing,” Jed said. “They’re getting out early in case there are any protestors at the airport.”
Dog’s attention was diverted by the feed fromHawk Three , which showed that one of the Chinese submarines had begun to submerge.
“They don’t look like they’re carrying out rescue operations,” Zen said. “They took in a few commandos, that’s it. Other sub is still on the surface, but looks like they’re bugging out too. Nothing big came aboard either one.”
“Roger that. We’re alerting the civil authorities,” said Dog.
Dreamland
14 September 1997
1005
WITH THE CLONEdown, Jennifer went back to helping the team studying the data on the Taiwanese computer. She scrolled through the decrypted emails, trying to see if anything there might be useful.
The information had been translated by a computer program into English. It was not exactly perfect, but it saved considerable time and could highlight key words; anything of special interest could be reviewed by a language specialist, either at Dreamland or back East at the NSA.
Three emails spoke of packages, which an NSA analyst guessed meant bombs, though of course that was just speculation. The “meat” of the emails was simple:
Package checked
Package sent
Package 3468×499986767×69696969
The last string of numbers appeared to be part of the encryption that the computer couldn’t unlock, though it was impossible to tell.
Jennifer began looking at more of the data on the computer. Apparently the men in the plant had initiated a scrubber program, and much of the drive had been erased. Danny’s team had located other computers, but they seemed to have been hit by the E-bomb. Data on all of them might be recoverable, but they would have to be analyzed back at Dreamland.
Package checked and sent. Probably the bomb.
Or the UAV.
Or lettuce.
She got up and went to look at the station where they were analyzing the video from Zen’s encounter with the UAV, checking pictures of the fuselage to see if a bomb had been carriaged below the fuselage. One of the technical experts had enhanced the image of the Taiwanese plane being launched from the ship; the image had been generated completely from radar, in some ways a more interesting technical feat than the creation of the UAV itself. Jennifer watched in fascination as the techie put the display into freeze-frame, then dialed in a program that analyzed the structure of the aircraft.
“Are those vertical tabs?” Jennifer asked, pointing at two bars that protruded from the area near the top of the wing root.
“Probably just weird radar echoes,” said the engineer. The frame advanced; the pieces remained on the aircraft.
“If they weren’t echoes, what would they be?” Jennifer asked.
“Hooks to recover the aircraft or hoist it onto the catapult.”
“Or launch it from a plane,” said Jennifer. “Like the U/MF-3 Flighthawk.”
“Sure.”
Jennifer went back to her station. An NSA analyst looking at the data had just sent an instant message suggesting the number stream after “package” in the third email might be a key for a code to activate the bomb. Jennifer called it back.
The repetition at the end of the number stream looked familiar, though by itself it seemed to mean nothing. She pulled over her laptop and brought up the code they had prepared for taking over the UAV.
There were similar sequences in the tail of the communications streams, though she had no idea what they stood for.
¥69696969
A coincidence?
If the NSA analyst’s guess was correct, then the intercepted communications might mean that the ghost clone had been carrying a nuke when they first encountered it.
But that was impossible—Jennifer turned to the screen on her right, clicking into the stored data to bring up the analysis prepared from the early intercepts. The performance seemed to rule out any bomb.
Unless the code unlocked something in the com stream. Maybe it was part of an encryption key.
What if the package was another UAV? Because maybe you’d want to know the key it used for communications.
Maybe. She needed to look through the rest of the data.
No time for that if there was another plane.
“Ray—I think there’s another clone, another plane,” she said aloud. “Look at this.”
On the Ground in Kaohisiung
15 September 1997
0109
DANNY WATCHED THEMarine teams checking in with their captain, listening as the
y reviewed their findings. The men worked smoothly, running through the different piles of recycled material as if they’d done this sort of thing a million times before.
“We’re getting some hits on one of the Geiger counters,” the Marine captain told Danny. “In the battery section.”
“Let me check it out,” said Stoner.
“You have to get the protective gear on,” said the Marine.
“Yeah,” said the CIA officer, walking toward the shed anyway.
Danny shook his head, then went over to check with Liu and Boston in Shed One.
“Never been in a nuke factory before,” said Liu as Danny poked his head through the hole at the back that the two troopers had cut for access.
“Looks more like a machine shop,” said Danny.
“I thought it’d at least look like a science lab or something,” said Boston. “We gonna glow when we get out of here?”
Danny laughed. They hadn’t detected any serious radiation levels; a visit to the dentist posed a greater health threat.
A pair of Marines had begun carting out computer equipment. Boston, helping them, picked up a large memory unit and brought it out to the Osprey.
“The guys back at Dreamland say they assembled them right in this area here,” said Liu. “Didn’t even use a clean room.”
Danny looked around the building. Itdid look like a machine shop. Not even—an empty shed with a few large machines, bunch of computers.
Was it that easy to build a bomb?
He began walking around the shed, wondering to himself how difficult his job might be in five or ten years. If a private company could build a nuke, when would some crazy fundamentalist in the Middle East do so?
There were crates against the wall, vegetable crates.
“Bomb squad took out two five-hundred-pounders,” said Liu, referring to a small squad of demo experts tasked to deal with the weapons. “Said they didn’t have fuses and couldn’t go off, but nobody wanted to take any chances. Leave them for the authorities.”
“They came in these boxes?” said Danny, pointing.
“Don’t know. The boxes were there. I don’t know if they were crating them. Couldn’t figure it out.”
“I saw some boxes like that in Taipei,” said Danny. “In a hangar there.”
“Just vegetable boxes. Bring lettuce and stuff around, like that.”
“A lot of lettuce gets eaten in Taipei.”
“Tons.”
Danny flicked his com control to talk to Dreamland.
AboardRaven
0120
WITH THETAIWANESEand American authorities now arriving on the scene of the sinking,Raven and its Flighthawks were reduced to the role of spectators. Zen let C3take both Flighthawks in a general patrol pattern; it was the down part of the mission, and once he had his own aircraft squared away, he turned his attention to his two young protégés aboardPenn .
Zen shook his head as Starship and Kick engaged in some good-natured banter over how close the Chinese Communist missile had come to splashing the Osprey before Starship managed to get his Flighthawk in the way. The joking started a bit off-color and then went quite a bit further; about the only word that could be repeated in polite company was “road.”
“All right guys, let’s not forget we’re working,” Zen told them finally.
He felt more than a little proud, as if he were a high school basketball coach whose team had just won the championship. It wasn’t that bad a metaphor, actually—they were clucking away like high school kids, their jokes on a sophomore’s level.
At best.
“Check your fuel,” he added. “I don’t want you walking home.”
Starship’s retort was cut off by Dog on the interphone.
“Zen, I want you in on this. Go to the main Dreamland channel.”
He clicked off without saying anything else to the two Flighthawk pilots, listening as Ray Rubeo detailed an argument for another UAV.
“We’re trying to get a line on that plane,” added Rubeo. “The surveillance equipment that Captain Freah placed shows the other still in the hangar.”
“What plane?” asked Zen.
“Chen Lee’s companies have two 767s. One is in Taipei on the ground but we’re looking for another that they seem to have leased a few months back,” explained Dog. “The UAV has handles that could be used for an air launch. We have someone en route to the airport to take a look at it.”
“Let’s get north,” said Zen.
“My thoughts exactly,” said Dog.
Aboard Island Flight A101
0130
FANN CHECKED THEcourse marker. The UAV had a range just over fifteen hundred miles, but that was without the extra weight of a bomb, and flying at medium to high altitude. Professor Ai had calculated that its fuel would take it roughly a thousand as presently configured. They were just approaching the thousand-mile mark now.
The longer they waited, the less possibility there was of the small plane running out of fuel. But it also increased the chance that they would be found.
He checked the map and his watch again. In less than two hours, Beijing would be destroyed.
No—the communists would be destroyed. The capital,his capital, would be intact.
He would return to Taipei, a hero.
And a criminal, in the eyes of the communists and their collaborators in the present government. Undoubtedly he would be killed. But death merely meant a change; it was no more permanent than life.
Waiting increased the chances of success, but it would also allow him to see the explosion. He would witness the moment of his grandfather’s triumph with his own eyes.
“We are in range,” said Ai.
“We will wait as long as possible. I calculate an optimum launch in twenty minutes,” he told the scientists.
“The communists are reacting to action by the Americans. They are scrambling fighters, alerting their troops. I’ve seen the radar and radio intercepts and—”
“We will wait as long as possible.”
AboardRaven
0140
ACCORDING TO THEmanual, a “stock” B-52H could make 516 knots at altitude. B-52s had long ago ceased to be “stock,” and in practice the typical Stratofortress’s hull was so cluttered with add-ons and extra gear that even 500 knots in level flight could be more fantasy than reality.
Dreamland’s EB-52s—which in most cases had started their lives as B-52Hs—contained no external blisters to slow them down. Thirty-something years of work on jet engine technology allowed their four power plants to do the work of the original eight more efficiently, and the use of more alloy and composites in the wing and tail structures did the same for the airfoil. In short, if an entry for the Megafortress’s top speed were to be made in a reference book, it would be listed at close to 600 knots, along with an asterisk indicating that, depending on the configuration of the power plants and the load the massive plane carried, it might do considerably better.
Dog, with full military power selected, passed the 600-knot mark as he pushed northward through the Taiwan Strait, the two U/MF-3s leading the way.
Mainland China and Taiwan existed side by side in an intricate and highly charged relationship. On the one hand, their governments considered each other bitter enemies. On the other, there was a myriad of commercial relationships between the pair. Among those relationships were regular flights from Taipei to a number of Mainland cities, most especially Shanghai.
Such flights might give cover to a 767 loaded with a UAV and nuclear device, Dog thought.
“Ravento Dream Command. Major Catsman, have we located that other 767 yet?”
“We’re going over the airport right now,” said Catsman. “We have CIA assets on the ground.”
“Copy that.”
Dog looked over at his fuel panel. They had about three more hours of flying time before nudging into the reserve cushion, depending on what twists and turns Dog took.
He brought up another set o
f instrument readings on the configurable screen, focusing on his aircraft’s performance.Raven could have been used to set the benchmarks for a maintenance manual.
Come to think of it, it had.
“Danny, what’s your situation?” he asked Captain Freah, bouncing back onto the Dreamland line.
“We’re secure here. Still going over everything, but it looks about as clean as a diner an hour before the health department inspectors arrive. Authorities are at the gate,” Danny added. “We’re holding them off—got about another ten to fifteen minutes of searching to get through.”
“Roger that.”
On the Ground in Kaohisiung
0151
STONER SAW THEpanel behind the vat of sulfuric acid a second or two after the Marines did, and had to shout at them to keep back.
“Very good chance the sucker’s booby-trapped,” he told the two men, who unlike him were wearing special chem suits with breathers to protect them from the acidic fumes.
It wasn’t that Stoner liked to take unnecessary risks; he knew people worked in this plant with the acid all the time, and figured his brief exposure was nothing like what they exposed themselves to.
Not that it was pleasant. He went to the floor panel and knelt down, instantly soaking his knees in the residue of a thousand car batteries. He could feel the material get sodden and start to tickle at his skin.
“Back,” he told the Marines, pulling out a long knife.
One of the men began to object; if the panel was booby-trapped, they had a special squad trained to defuse it. But Stoner had already found two wires with his knife; he pulled them up gently, scraped some of the insulation off, then checked the current with a small meter the size of pen top. A yellow light flashed on; he clipped another set of alligator clips to the wires and got a green.
“You’re fucking lucky,” said one of the Marines as he jimmied open the lock.
“How’s that?”
“Could have just as easily blown when it was shorted.”
“Well, only if my sensor here screwed up. It’s all right—my guess is it’s just an alarm and it was taken out by the E-bomb,” said Stoner, shining around the flashlight. “There aren’t any charges here.”
Dale Brown's Dreamland--Strike Zone Page 28
